DARLINGTON, S.C. -- The plan worked to perfection...until it didn't.
One moment, Ryan Blaney was the leader after chasing down Tyler Reddick in the closing laps of Sunday's Cup Series race at Darlington Raceway. The next, he was preparing for the overtime restart that ultimately took away his opportunity to win his first race of the season.
"If the caution didn't come out, I thought we would have won easily," Blaney said after finishing fifth in Sunday's Cup Series race. "Like we were so much faster on newer tires. We had a great strategy call running long."
The No. 12 team used two different strategies during Sunday's Cup Series race. They were the first to pit during green flag pit stops in stage 2. This did not pan out as debris brought out the caution shortly after and reshuffled the field.
The strategy in the final stage was to run longer than the rest of the drivers contending for the win. He continued making laps while Tyler Reddick, Christopher Bell, and then William Byron all made their green flag stops.
This strategy dropped Blaney to the back half of the top 10 with just over 40 laps remaining in the scheduled distance, but he had the speed to work through the field.
He steadily did so while passing Joey Logano, Byron, Bell, and other drivers. He erased Reddick's lead of over six seconds and made the pass for the lead with four laps remaining in the scheduled distance.
"Our kind of only play was to try to run long like that," crew chief Jonathan Hassler said after the race. "Worked out probably better than I thought it would with the chance to take the win."
This plan initially worked. Blaney took the lead and began to pull away from Reddick, but the caution derailed it. Kyle Larson checked up in front of Bubba Wallace, who had no time to react. Wallace hit Larson from behind, sent the No. 5 Chevrolet into the inside SAFER barrier, and sent the race to overtime.
This created another problem for Blaney, whose team lost multiple spots on pit road throughout the day. One poor stop was due to an issue with the jack.
Blaney led the field to the pits for the final stop, but he fell to fourth despite having a clean sequence. Denny Hamlin's team delivered their best stop of the day and helped him take the lead off pit road.
It all came down to this critical moment.@dennyhamlin goes from third to first on pit road. pic.twitter.com/nwgb3YUobA
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) April 6, 2025
"If you look, they definitely had one mistake with the jack that cost us a lot of time," Hassler said. "Our last stop was clean, a 9.3 (second stop), I think, but the (other) guys were running low eights and the 24, I think we matched his time there on the last stop in pit stall one."
This final stop wasn't catastrophic for the No. 12 team; it was just slower than that of the race-winning No. 11 team, the No. 45 team, and the No. 24 team. This dropped Blaney to the second row for the overtime restart.
These spots are hard to make up in only two laps, especially while driving a car built for the long run.
"It was just a day where nothing really went our way," Blaney said. "It's kind of crappy. That part sucks about it. Your car is so fast, and we just kept having to make it up. "It was like, 'Gosh, we have to come from 15th to the top three.' We just could never start at the front.
"I thought we were, by far, the best car, especially the second half of the race, and just had to keep playing catch-up, so we have to clean a few things up on our end, for sure, but I'm really proud of the effort."